


A Group Of Remarkable People

by iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, But Like. On a Grand Scale, Everybody Lives, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Just This Once: Everybody Lives!, Multi, Peter Quill Is Not Human, Role Reversal, Some (Two) Character Deaths Stay The Same For Plot Reasons BUT They Get Better, Temporary Character Death, The Opposite Set of People Get Snapped, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:55:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26518594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid/pseuds/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid
Summary: We know how the story goes. Thanos snaps his fingers. Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, Wanda Maximoff, Peter Parker, King T’Challa, Princess Shuri, half the Guardians of the Galaxy, and trillions and trillions of others vanish into dust.But sometimes—Well, sometimes that’s notexactlyhow the story goes.
Relationships: Gamora/Peter Quill, James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson, Loki & Thor (Marvel), Peter Quill & Guardians of the Galaxy Team
Comments: 46
Kudos: 137





	A Group Of Remarkable People

**Author's Note:**

> the other summary would've been "hey wouldn't it be wild if the opposite set of people died in infinity war" but like, that's not how you write summaries
> 
> this story happens in three parts: part one is mostly leading up to the killing of thanos like in the beginning of endgame + flashbacks to how infinity war went differently in this au. this part also has a somewhat nonlinear timeline, but to make things a bit easier if you have trouble with those, everything that happened before the snap is written in the past tense and everything after the snap is written in the present tense. warnings in this chapter for **canon-typical violence** , and as always please let me know if you think i should warn for anything else
> 
> lastly, please consider saintseneca's [only the young die good](https://open.spotify.com/track/6rtNLT2zfzJYUYHNEILTDz?si=8eCcCBNiRrirUmMwPVTJhA) as this fic's official theme song please and thank you

Two hours and thirty-six minutes following the annihilation of half of all life in the universe, Loki finds himself on his knees in one of the many aircrafts stationed in this Midgardian docking bay, elbow-deep in wires.

This place — this _country,_ since apparently that’s what Wakanda is — as far as he can tell is home to the most advanced technology available on the planet. Given that this is Earth, that’s not saying all that much, but… well. It’s workable. More workable than anything Loki saw on his last visit to this planet, anyway, and for that much he supposes he has to be grateful. Small mercies.

_Oh, and God knows you’re at a dire shortage of those right now, aren’t you?_

Loki squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. He takes a breath, banishing that voice yet again. He sends it back to the corners of his mind where he’s boxed up every shred of coherent thought for the last two and a half hours.

Every thought that isn’t _get the hell off this planet._

Every thought that isn’t numbing cold calm.

Every thought that isn’t entirely focused on the task in front of him.

It will take a bit of creativity, and a lot of finagling with the ship’s internal wiring. Actually, given that Loki is very, very far from an expert on ship mechanics and rocket science, it will take a lot of creativity, and probably a good deal of spells here and there, too. A spell to keep the ship producing oxygen in the vacuum of space. Another spell to give the thrusters enough power to escape Midgard’s gravity. Yet another spell to protect himself in the event that the _actual_ owners of this ship take offense to his borrowing of it; after all, he’s not looking to be shot out of the sky before he’s even breached the upper atmosphere.

Perhaps some sort of cloaking spell would—

“I am Groot?”

Loki jolts, nearly smacking his head into the top of the wiring compartment.

When he extricates himself and looks over his shoulder, he finds the young _Flora colossus_ standing in the open doorway to the ship, staring at him. Miraculously, that little handheld game of his is nowhere to be seen, and Loki finds that the prolonged eye contact is a touch more uncomfortable than it should be, coming from a teenage twig.

He waits about three seconds for Groot to elaborate, and when no further explanation is forthcoming, Loki asks, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Groot shrugs. “I am Groot.”

“Exactly.”

Satisfied, Loki turns back to his task.

If he can just figure out _where_ the thrusters are connected—

“I am Groot?”

Loki stops again, shooting him a look. “Oh, I’m sorry, I was unaware I had to run everything I do by you first. What the hell do you mean, why didn’t I tell you?”

“I am Groot.”

“No, you most certainly are _not_ coming with me.”

“I am Groot.”

“No. You are not.”

“I am _Groot.”_

Loki exhales roughly through his nose, pressing the heel of his palm into his own forehead.

“This is not a debate.”

“I am Groot!”

Loki has never, in all his long life, ever wanted _so much_ to track down whatever Fate is responsible for this turn of events and throttle them wherever they stand. Because— how? How did he end up here? How is he of all people alive at the end of the world, at the end of _everything,_ alone on this godforsaken rock with no easy means of escape and a talking adolescent tree who’s convinced that they’re… what, friends? Because they fought together? Because they had a common enemy?

 _Have,_ his mind helpfully supplies. _You have a common enemy._

_Present tense._

_Because the bastard’s still alive._

Loki drops his hand. Shakes his head. Takes yet another carefully controlled breath.

“You cannot come with me. The rest of your… friends,” Loki says, squinting because he’s unsure what the tree’s relations to that motley assortment of species actually was, “are likely going to come here looking for you.” He turns his back on Groot, facing the wiring compartment again. “If you leave, you’ll miss them.”

“I am Groot.”

Loki opens his mouth. Shuts it. Rolls his eyes. “Yes, assuming they’re still alive. But my point stands.”

“I am Groot.”

He almost laughs. Almost. There’s a hollow, bitter sort of humor in the idea that he would even begin to entertain the idea of staying here on Earth. A humor that rubs the wrong way along the edges of his grief.

_Do you really think it’s a good idea to go back to Earth?_

“That is not happening.”

“I am Groot?”

“Because there is nothing _for_ me here,” Loki all but growls, and he rips a wire out of its socket without thinking.

Damn it. _Damn_ it. That was likely something vital.

“I am Groot.”

“There is no reason for me to stay on this planet—”

And there again, out of nowhere, like a blinding jolt, like the magic he used on the Valkyrie ages ago or — _Norns, was that really only a few days ago?_ — Loki sees it at the forefront of his mind again, he sees Thor taking a single step forward and collapsing into ash, he sees his own magic desperately reaching out and doing absolutely nothing to stop it, and it’s all so vivid that it briefly knocks the air from his voice. He feels bile rising in his throat all over again before he manages to swallow it down.

“There is no reason for me to stay on this planet,” he repeats, so calm now that his voice is foreign to his own ears. “I’m leaving, and—”

“I am Groot?”

“It’s not your concern where I’m going.”

“I am Groot!”

“It’s not your concern what I’m going to do, either. As I said—”

“I am _Groot!”_

Loki slams his fist down onto the top of the wiring compartment hard enough to leave a dent, and the next second he’s on his feet. He whirls around and snaps, “I don’t know! Is that what you want to hear? I don’t know where I’m going to go, and I don’t know what I’m going to do!” And oh, _there_ it is, the anger rising like an unstoppable tide, boiling, filling him up to the throat, sending his voice into a crescendo as he stomps forward and shouts, “Perhaps I’ll find whatever miserable corner of existence Thanos has hidden himself in and I’ll tear him limb from limb myself, or more likely I’ll die trying, or perhaps I’ll simply find a bar at the furthest corner of the universe and _drink myself into oblivion,_ but I am leaving, and you are not coming with me, and whatever happens after that is no concern of yours because _we are not friends.”_

The shouting should be cathartic.

It’s not.

He’s left feeling hollow and out of breath, his lungs scraped raw, with an ache pulsing from the side of his fist and not a single ounce of satisfaction to show for it.

Groot doesn’t look angry. He looks like he’s _trying_ to look angry, but it’s far too easy to see through the bravado. It’s easy to see that Loki’s words cut exactly as deep as he’d intended them to.

Something unpleasant coils in Loki’s gut, and he sighs.

“Look—”

But before he can say anything else, a deep reddish-purple light washes over the docking bay outside the ship’s door.

The light comes on and then fades, comes on and then fades. An alarm, clearly, and for a moment Loki feels his heart plummet down into his stomach. For a moment he finds himself standing on the _Statesman_ all over again, listening to the desperate voice of a long dead Asgardian over the ship’s communication systems. _We are under assault, I repeat, we are under assault… Engines are dead, life support failing… This is not a warcraft, repeat…_

The voice that comes over the communications system this time is not one that Loki has known, if distantly, for most of his life. This time it’s the voice of this planet’s — no, that’s not right, this _country’s_ king, the one who’d commanded all those armies on the battlefield right up until the end. The one with the strikingly impenetrable war suit.

 _“Attention: A new breach has been detected in the upper atmosphere directly above Wakanda,”_ King T’Challa’s voice echoes through the whole place. _“Anyone who is still in fighting condition, be at the ready.”_

“I am Groot?”

Loki gulps. “I have no idea.”

Honestly, he’s almost… relieved at the prospect of having to fight off yet another wave of enemies. Finally, someone to take out all this directionless anger at— _oh, but that’s not true, is it, it’s not directionless, you know exactly who you’re angry with, and it’s not even Thanos—_

Hell, perhaps he’ll even die properly this time.

But then the communications system comes right back on not a second later, and this time, it’s not the King. Instead it’s a young girl whose voice Loki has never heard at all.

_“Everyone, disregard the call to arms! The newcomers have made contact and they come in peace. Repeat, please disregard the call to arms. The newcomers have made contact and they come in peace.”_

There’s a _click_ as the communications system shuts off.

The red light does not come back.

Groot nervously wrings his hands together. He seems to have entirely forgotten Loki’s outburst in light of this news; and really, Loki mostly has, too.

“I am Groot?”

Loki shrugs. He finds, surprisingly, that he hopes it _is_ Groot’s family arriving after all, and he’s not sure whether that’s out of genuine concern for the little tree or because it means Loki will finally be left alone. He doesn’t care enough to parse it.

“Could be.”

“I am Groot?”

“You should go to the palace’s upper level,” Loki tells him. “That’s likely where they’ll have made contact.”

But then there’s yet another _click_ from above, and the young girl’s voice comes back.

 _“And Loki,”_ she says, startling him. _“If you are all finished attempting to hijack one of my ships, would you be so kind as to make your way up to my lab? The newcomers are asking for you.”_

“What _happened?”_

Oh, it was awful.

It was, Mantis thought, like the Benatar had jumped from clear open space right into the end of the world. 

“Oh, my God,” Peter murmured, leaning forward in his seat.

There were bodies everywhere. Bodies, and bits of rubble from what might have once been an enormous spaceship.

“Yeesh. Looks like we’re not getting paid,” Rocket said, just as—

_WHAM._

One of the bodies smacked into the windshield, and abruptly, everyone on the Benatar began shouting in a near panic. Rocket fumbled for the controls to turn on the wipers, Gamora went several shades too pale, Groot dropped his game, Peter looked nearly ready to gag, Drax was shouting something about putting the Benatar in reverse, and then…

The body’s eyes — or eye, Mantis supposed, since there only seemed to be one — opened.

“Holy shit,” Peter said.

“He is alive?” Drax asked. “But how?”

“He’s alive,” Peter echoed quietly, like he did not quite believe it. And then, “Shit, shit, shit, he’s _alive._ Holy shit. Someone open the airlock!”

It took the combined effort of Drax and Gamora, both wearing protective force-field space suits, to drag the alive man on board. Mantis stood back with Groot and Rocket, watching as — peculiarly — small arcs of electricity seemed to _pop_ off the exposed skin of the man’s arms. They were just about through the airlock when Gamora shouted and shook her hand like the electricity had burned her, but then she groaned and returned to the task of pulling the man through, her jaw tight.

As soon as the inner airlock door closed, the man collapsed to the floor. He was conscious, but just barely, rasping rattling breaths as he struggled to push himself up.

“Hey, hey, hey, hey, easy,” Peter tried, crouching down in front of him. “Deep breaths, dude, you were just in space. It’s gonna take a minute to—”

But apparently, it would not take a minute.

The man heaved himself up onto his knees, and then stumbled to his feet, one hand pressing into his chest as if to quell a pain there. He cast a fearful one-eyed gaze over the interior of the Benatar.

“Okay,” Peter said, taking a step back. His voice was small and his eyes were very, very wide. “Or not. Sure.”

The man’s gaze settled on the windshield, through which the floating bodies and rubble were still plainly visible. From the look on his face, Mantis knew immediately and without question that she very much did not want to touch this man. Not now. Not any time soon, either.

But something else settled in his face then. Something other than the bottomless despair and grief and guilt.

Something like determination. Or desperation. It was impossible to know which.

“My brother,” he said, oddly, his eye still on the windshield. “My brother’s out there. Quickly, there’s not much time—”

“Uh,” Peter said. “Dude, no offense, but…”

“You were the only one still alive,” Gamora finished for him.

“No,” the man said. “He’s hurt, but he’s alive—”

“Hate to break it to ya,” Rocket said, quietly, shaking his head, “but there ain’t any other heat signatures out there.”

The man shook his head. “He wouldn’t have one.”

Rocket frowned. “What? How?”

“Seriously?” Gamora asked.

“Yes! Seriously, just— please. Bring the ship around. If you won’t, I will go out there myself and find him, because he’s still alive but he _will not be_ for much longer if we don’t act now.”

There was a beat of silence, and then Peter threw his hands up.

“Shit! Alright,” Peter shouted. “Looks like we got a rescue mission. Start her up!”

Peter is hurt.

Gamora is gone. _(Dead,_ Mantis knows but does not quite allow herself to think the actual word. _Dead, she’s dead, I killed her, I had to.)_ And Nebula is gone, too — vanished into dust along with the man in the metal suit and his wizard friend and surely so many others that Mantis cannot bear to think about. Gamora is gone and Nebula is gone and Groot and Rocket might be gone, too, but all of that falls to the wayside because, right now, Peter is hurt. Badly.

Mantis hurries to open up the Benatar’s entrance ramp.

When Drax moves to lift Peter up, he is met with a choked off, agonized cry, and he automatically freezes.

“We must get him onto the ship,” Mantis tells him.

“She— she’s right, man,” Peter grits out, his right hand shaking where it hovers over the bleeding wound in his side. “Just… _shit,_ just i- ignore me, okay?”

“We will not ignore you,” Drax says. “You are gravely injured.”

“I know, that’s not— I just— I meant— oh, _fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck,”_ Peter wheezes, tensing from head to toe.

Mantis shouts, “Drax!”

That seems to spark him to action. Drax gets a determined look in his eyes. He bends down and hefts Peter up into his arms, and this time he does not acknowledge the horrible pained sound that the movement draws from him.

As Drax carries Peter onto the ship, Mantis turns toward the young Terran— the one with the strange metal suit, though the mask of that suit is deactivated at the moment. He is sitting on the ground right where the other Terran had been standing before… well, before. He is shaking, too, but not quite as badly as Peter is.

Shock, Mantis thinks. Or fear.

“Are you alright?”

The Terran looks up at her. His eyes are very red. He stares at her for a moment before sniffling, scrubbing at his face, and answering, “I don’t… I don’t know?”

“That is alright,” Mantis says.

Because it is alright if he does not know. None of them know. _She_ certainly doesn’t.

She thinks of the other Terran, then. The older one. He was also wearing a strange metal suit, and he was the only one of them who fought against Thanos alone for any measure of time. She thinks of the way he had pointed at Peter and then at Mantis and Drax across the battlefield just before he disappeared.

 _Quill,_ he said, deadly serious. _All of you, you get him back to Earth, you understand me? You get him home._

He had barely managed to finish that last word, _home,_ before the dust carried him away.

“Will you come with us onto our ship?” Mantis asks the younger Terran now. “We are going to go to Earth.”

The Terran sniffles again, but he nods.

“Great,” she says. She thinks about offering him a hand to help him up, but she decides against it. Best not to use her ability if she can help it. “I am Mantis.”

“Peter,” the Terran says, getting to his feet. “My name’s Peter.”

“Oh! Is that a common name on your planet?”

“I… I guess?”

“I only ask because that is Peter’s name as well,” Mantis says as they begin walking to the Benatar side-by-side.

The Terran — Peter, as it turns out — frowns and looks toward the ship. “What? Quill?”

“Yes. That is his full name. Peter Quill.”

Peter stares with his red eyes ahead at the Benatar. Inside, Mantis knows Drax will have already laid _their_ Peter out on one of the cots in the lower level, and by now he will have applied one of the emergency packs of first aid sealant to the wound in his side.

“Is he gonna be okay?”

Mantis blinks, looking toward Peter. “Yes,” she says, suddenly certain of it. “Yes, he is.”

“That’s…” Peter trails off, sniffling again. “That’s good.”

He continues to stare, blankly, as if he is not quite seeing the ship at all, as if he is staring through it.

“What is wrong?” Mantis asks.

Peter shakes his head. “I just… I don’t— I don’t _get_ it.”

“You don’t get what?”

“I don’t get _why,”_ Peter says, and his voice sounds like something has lodged itself in his throat. “Why did—? Why did Doctor Strange give up one of the stones to save _him,”_ he says, nodding toward the Benatar, “if it meant…?”

He waves around them, and it is obvious how that question ends.

Mantis frowns. She did not question it at the time, because of course she would have done the very same thing to save Peter. She would have done the very same thing to save Drax, too, or Nebula, or Rocket or Groot or Gamora, had they been there. But the wizard had only just _met_ them all, so why would he…?

She shakes her head.

“I do not know.”

When Loki woke up, he awoke to an excruciating bout of electricity _scorching_ through his veins, which — while deeply, deeply uncomfortable — was not all that concerning. It was a familiar sort of lightning, anyway.

What _was_ concerning was the fact that he couldn’t breathe.

He gasped, or attempted to, at any rate. The air seemed solid, lodging at the back of his throat and refusing to move. He rolled over onto his side, propped up on one elbow with his heart hammering a rapidfire beat through his skull, and he fumbled and grasped for any shred of magic he could reach. Wisps of _seiðr_ curled around his fingertips but then, each time he tried and failed to suck in a breath and promptly fell into a new heart-pounding wave of panic, it would slip from his grasp and vanish to nothing. He couldn’t breathe, and if he couldn’t breathe then he was going to die right here and right now and— and—

There was a hand on his upper back.

Someone was talking, though he couldn’t quite hear it.

 _Oh, come now,_ he thought in a voice that was not quite his own but which sounded familiar all the same. _Really, Loki. Are you a sorcerer or aren’t you?_

He snagged onto the magic again, imagined wrapping it around his palm end over end like a length of rope so it couldn’t slip away, and he brought it to his throat with little thought beyond a gut-deep wordless plea.

His throat opened up. Just a hair. Just enough to allow a thimble of air at a time to whistle its way through.

It was all he needed.

Slowly, very slowly, some sound beyond the pounding of his own pulse finally began to filter in.

Voices.

“… ho-lee _shit.”_

“… but how did…?”

“… am Groot.”

“… weren’t kiddin’ ‘bout the…”

“… Thor, is he…?”

Ah.

Well, that explained the hand on his back, at least. And the lightning.

When his lungs no longer felt like they were burning him up from the inside, and when he had enough air in him to do more than simply sit there and wheeze like an infant, Loki turned a bit and saw Thor kneeling beside him.

“You…” he started to say, winced, and tried again. “You _electrocuted_ me.”

Thor looked like he couldn’t decide whether to burst into laughter or burst into tears.

So he did both.

The next thing Loki knew, he was being pulled in close with Thor’s arms tight around his shoulders, his own arm bent awkwardly between them with his hand still funneling _seiðr_ into his throat.

“Your heart stopped,” Thor said, his voice low. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

And Loki couldn’t quite bring himself to return the embrace in any meaningful fashion, but he could sit there and not move and let Thor reassure himself that — just this once — his brother had not fled the land of the living and left him alone.

Alone, because Loki knew without having to ask that they most certainly were.

The facts were plain enough. Even without an Infinity Stone at his disposal, Thanos had always been a force to be reckoned with. He’d been nigh undefeatable with just one. And Loki had just handed over a second in exchange for his brother’s life. There was not a chance in hell that anyone on that ship had survived the encounter, save for the hundred or so that had fled in the escape pods before the battle ever started.

And save, of course, for the two of them.

 _Two sons of the crown,_ his own voice rang in the back of his head, _set adrift._

Sam hasn’t stopped shaking since it happened.

Could be the blood loss. He took a set of those freaky monster’s claws to his thigh at some point in the fight, and it took a blood transfusion and some quick work by Princess Shuri’s whirring medical nanobots to drag him back from the edge of bleeding out.

Could be the mild concussion, too. He went through one hell of a fall when that nine-foot-tall asshole flicked his wrist like it was nothing and deactivated his wings mid-flight.

It could be either of those things.

He knows it’s not.

On some level, he figures he probably should have known this was coming. Not _this_ this, but something like this. Something really off-the-charts kind of crazy. Aliens and six-armed monsters and Infinity Stones and all that.

Because at first it was just S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra, and that much Sam could handle. You point him at a shady organization of old school Nazis flying under the radar, and he’s got no problem pulling the trigger. No big deal. But then it was a brainwashed super soldier, and then it was a _shitload_ of brainwashed super soldiers, and then it was running from the law, and still, Sam could handle all that. Sometimes he’d hear the voice of his old Sergeant saying _you got in way over your head this time, didn’t you, Wilson,_ but still. He could handle it. His crazy bullshit barometer ticked up a little more every day, but it never quite got high enough to burst.

Now it’s like someone’s gone and dropped a goddamn nuke on it.

“Sam?”

He blinks.

Bucky’s sitting in the stool across from him. His metal arm is detached and lying palm-up on the lab countertop, patiently waiting for when the Princess will have time to take a look at it. Bucky himself, exhausted and dead eyed and nursing a gunshot wound in his only flesh-and-bone arm, is looking directly at Sam.

“What’s…?” Bucky asks, pointing at his own head and swirling his finger around. _What are you thinking so hard about,_ he doesn’t ask. _What’s with the thousand-yard-stare,_ he doesn’t ask, either. He doesn’t have to.

The lab around them is quiet, despite the plethora of Wakandan soldiers crowding up the place, getting treated for a whole host of moderate-to-life-threatening injuries. No one’s saying a word, too bogged down with the weight of a battle lost, so the only sound is a whole lot of beeping and clicking and metal scraping and a few hushed voices here and there.

“Sam.”

Right. What was he thinking about?

“Uh.” Sam clears his throat. “Mercury barometers.”

Bucky raises his eyebrows.

Sam just shrugs.

At that moment, something cuts through the dull quiet of the lab — there’s a weird flash of light, a flash and a shimmer, and Sam jolts, skidding his seat back a few inches on the floor. Bucky’s already got his hand on the knife strapped to his waist by the time they realize it’s not a threat.

Well. Technically not. Probably not.

Not anymore, at least.

Standing in the center of the lab is the very same dude that was on the news with his _own_ alien army trying to take over Manhattan six years ago, and even now Sam can’t help thinking _just where the hell was that bigass army this time around, man?_ It’s also the same dude that Sam thought for sure was officially dead as of around 2014. Apparently his information was off, though, since the guy looked pretty damn alive when he landed in the middle of the battlefield alongside Thor and that weirdo gun-toting raccoon and the talking tree.

“There you are,” Princess Shuri says, looking up from the huge layout of holographic screens she’s fiddling with.

She waves a hand, and the screens fade away. And then, apparently without a single concern about who this guy is and what he’s done — then again, Sam guesses she couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when the Incident happened, and on the other side of the world no less — she walks right up to him and plants her hands on her hips.

“I will make this quick. The newcomers will land in the fields just south of the palace very shortly,” she tells him. “They have told me they are Asgardian refugees. They have told me they have no wish to harm us. Is this true?”

Loki nods.

“I am going to need more than that,” the Princess says, firmly but not unkindly. “After everything that has happened, I _need_ your word that I am not making a mistake by letting yet more strangers into our country.”

“You have it,” Loki answers right away, his voice flat. “They’re telling the truth. They were— We were attacked before Thanos set his sights on Earth. Whoever is landing here now… they’re all that’s left. Children, parents. Not soldiers.”

The Princess nods, and her voice takes on an unmistakable edge of sympathy when she speaks again.

“They were asking for Thor as well.”

And even now Sam can see it so damn clearly, like it’s still happening — and hell, he’s probably gonna be seeing it like this for years and years and years, if the nightmares about Riley and then Rhodes were ever any indication of how this kind of thing can stick to your brain. He can see Thanos snapping his fingers, he can see the bastard smiling even with Thor’s axe sticking out of his chest, he can see Thor screaming at him, demanding to know what he’d done, and he can see everything that came after.

Nat went first. And then it was Rhodes and then it was Bruce and then the raccoon and then half the Wakandan soldiers all around them. Then Steve (and God, _Steve,_ it still fucking stings to think of him in the past tense) and then finally, despite some kind of weird shimmery magic that Loki tried to use to stop it, then it was Thor.

A greenish forcefield wrapped itself around him, and nothing but dust fell right through it half a second later.

Now, Loki just sets his jaw and shakes his head.

The Princess nods. “I thought that might be the case,” she says, and then: “I’m sorry.”

Loki says nothing to that.

Doesn’t look like the Princess was looking for a response anyway. She lifts her hand and taps one of the beads on her bracelet, and a new hologram projects itself above her open palm.

It’s a map, Sam realizes. A 3-D map of the Wakandan capital.

“This is the palace,” she says, pointing as she explains. “And this is the lab, where we are now. Those ships will be landing right here. You will find a small squadron of Wakandan guards stationed there awaiting their arrival. I will send word to them to let you pass.”

Again, Loki says nothing.

He gives her a single nod, turns on his heel, and vanishes.

“We have to go to Knowhere—”

“Wrong. Where we have to go is Nidavellir.”

“That’s a made up—!”

_“Nidavellir?”_

All heads turned toward Thor’s brother, who was now sitting on the table in the Benatar’s lower level with one hand still hovering over his jacked-up throat. Peter couldn’t help looking at it again — a weird greenish light had long since settled in the space between the guy’s palm and his bruised skin, sitting there like it was solid. And apparently it was helping, if the sound of his voice was anything to go by.

“Are you _mad?”_

“Yes,” Thor answered. “Extremely.”

“Hold up,” Rocket said. “Nidavellir’s _real?”_

“Yes, it is,” Loki said, not looking away from his brother, “and no, we are not going to Nidavellir.”

“I wasn’t asking for your permission.”

“Why would you even want to—?”

“Hang on, hang on, wait,” Peter cut in. “What the hell is Nida-what’s-it? You guys feel like filling us in?”

“Not particularly,” Loki said.

Rocket laughed, clearly getting more and more excited as he hopped up onto the table to bring himself a bit more even with everyone else. “Nidavellir’s a frickin’ legend! That’s where they make some of the most powerful, horrific weapons to ever torment the universe! I would _very_ much like to go there, please.”

“The rabbit is correct,” Thor said, “and clearly the smartest among you.”

“Rabbit?”

“I assume you’re the captain of this ship, sir?”

“Oh, well, yeah, you’re very perceptive—”

“Thanos has two Infinity Stones,” Loki spoke up before Peter could even form the words to object to Rocket calling himself the captain, “and he is likely well on his way to acquiring a third, at which point he will be halfway to his goal of annihilating _half of all life as we know it,_ and you wish to take a field trip to Nidavellir?”

“Yes. Only Eitri can make me the weapon I need—”

“If Eitri is even still alive!”

Uh. Okay, _that_ finally managed to get Thor to pause. He dropped his hand away from where he’d been trying to log into the Benatar’s pod, and he shot a narrow-eyed look at his brother.

“What do you mean, if he’s still alive? Why wouldn’t he be alive?”

Silence. From the look on his face, Loki looked like he would have gulped, if his throat still had the capacity for it.

“Loki,” Thor said, his voice startlingly dark. “What do you mean, if he’s still alive?”

“You saw that gauntlet,” Loki answered. “You saw what he could do with it. A gauntlet capable of wielding any Infinity Stone at all, let alone all six? Where do you imagine something like that came from?”

“You’re telling me Thanos attacked Nidavellir.”

“I’m telling you it’s an extremely likely possibility.”

“But Nidavellir was _under Asgard’s protection,”_ Thor snapped. “It was under my protection— under _your_ protection, and you just let—?”

“The attack would have likely happened recently, after Asgard was already gone,” Loki cut in. “In all likelihood, it did not happen while I was in power.”

_“In all likelihood?”_

“And if it did, I was unaware of it.”

“Unaware—?” Thor started to shout before his voice, apparently, failed him. He clenched his hands into fists, and out of nowhere, all the air in the ship started to thrum with the sort of hanging static that comes before a lightning strike. Peter shared a look across the ship with Gamora, who _definitely_ noticed, and she stepped forward and opened her mouth to say something, but Thor beat her to it. His eye was unwavering on his brother. “You were _unaware?_ If you hadn’t sent father to Earth— hell, if you’d just kept Heimdall at his post where he was _supposed to be,_ then you would have—!”

“As I said,” Loki interrupted again, his voice carefully controlled, probably to avoid ripping his already raw throat to shreds, “it is very unlikely that it occurred while I was in power.”

“And would you have lifted a finger to stop it, if it had?”

Loki’s mouth snapped shut.

Turns out that was all the answer Thor needed, and he looked away, shaking his head. Still pissed the hell off, clearly, but now at least making some effort to smother it down a little.

The static died down by increments.

“If Thanos has attacked Nidavellir,” Thor said, much calmer than before, “then it is all the more reason I have to go. They were under Asgard’s protection, and if anyone there is alive, then they are now under _my_ protection. And then if the forges are still running, I can get my weapon at the same time. Rabbit, would you like to join me?”

“Uh, sure, lemme just ask the captain,” Rocket said. “Oh, wait! That’s me. Yeah, I’ll go.”

“Wonderful.”

“Except for… that I’m the captain,” Peter muttered, pointing at himself. Rocket, predictably, totally ignored him and went about his business. “And that’s my backpack, and okay, _seriously,_ hold the hell up! This is my ship, and I’m not going to…” he trailed off, picking his brain for the name of the planet they were talking about, “… wherever, just to get some kind of… I mean, what kind of weapon are we talking about, here?”

“The Thanos killing kind,” Thor said.

Peter blinked, eyes wide. “Uh. Don’t you think we should all have a weapon like that?”

“No,” both Thor and Loki said at the same time, and then Loki continued, “None of you would be able to wield it. If you tried, your bodies would crumble as your minds descended into madness.”

“Is it weird that I wanna do it even more now?” Rocket asked.

“A little bit, yeah,” Thor admitted.

Finally, Gamora spoke up again. “If we don’t go to Knowhere and Thanos retrieves another stone, he’ll be too powerful to stop.”

“Yes! Thank you!” Peter said, waving at her.

“He already is too powerful to stop,” Thor argued.

Drax muttered, “He is not too powerful to stop.”

“Hey, hey, hey, relax, I got it all figured out,” Rocket said. “We got two ships, and a large assortment of morons. So me and Groot will go with the pirate-angel and his mopey brother here to get this crazy weapon or whatever, and the rest of the morons will go to Knowhere to try and stop Thanos. Cool? Cool.”

Thor nodded. “So cool.”

And… well, that was that.

“For the record,” Peter said, eyeing Rocket as he dragged Peter’s backpack up into the pod, “I know you’re only going with them ‘cause it’s where Thanos isn’t.”

“You know,” Rocket said, “you really gotta watch how you talk to your _captain,_ Quill.”

They’re maybe a full day’s flight off Titan by the time Peter’s finally healed enough from his stabbing — from his _impaling_ if you wanna get technical — to stay conscious for more than an hour or so at a time. And for a while, all he’s capable of doing is just lying there anyway, tensing up every time a fresh wave of pain ratchets its way through him, thinking nothing but a nonstop mantra of _oh holy shit this hurts._

Which is… well, it’s not fun, but at least it’s a distraction. Thinking _holy shit this hurts holy shit this hurts holy shit this hurts_ is one hell of a lot better than just about anything else he could be thinking right now.

But then, after who knows how long, as coherent thought slowly ekes its way back into his brain, he realizes with an instinctive stab of panic:

They’re not moving.

He gives himself a second to make sure he’s picking that up right. Are they really not moving, or are they just so far out in empty space that it’s too hard to tell? Sometimes that gets iffy, when there’s nothing nearby to generate gravity, nothing to cause the little microtwitches from the ship’s movement through the edges of a hundred different gravitational and magnetic fields, but…

Peter waits, and he listens, and all he hears is the low groan of a dead ship lilting through empty space.

They should be moving. No, actually, they shouldn’t be moving, they should be _hauling ass._ Titan was so far out on the outskirts of the galaxy, so far away from anything that could even come close to being called a civilized planet, that if they’re not speeding through jump after jump already, then that means…

Peter hauls himself out of the bed, gritting his teeth. Christ, this is harder than it should be. The wound’s probably somewhere around halfway healed, if he had to guess — but then again, he’s not exactly a doctor, so who the hell knows. He’s only going off his own very limited knowledge of how well those emergency healing packs are supposed to work, and his even more limited knowledge of exactly how long he’s been out.

It hurts like a son of a bitch, but hell, at least he can move. At least he’s still goddamn breathing.

He manages to limp out of his quarters and get to the doorway, where he leans heavily into the door frame and squints out at the dim lighting of the Benatar’s lower level. Everyone’s out here, apparently — _everyone that’s left,_ his brain oh-so-nicely pipes up — but the kid’s curled up fast asleep on one of the spare beds, totally engulfed in a couple of their emergency blankets, and Mantis looks like she fell asleep sitting up against the wall right next to him with another blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Drax is the only one still awake, quietly rifling through a box of spare engine parts.

And yeah, they’re sure as shit not moving. Peter can’t hear the engine from here, and he _knows_ there’s been a rattle in the alternator ever since Rocket gutted the plasma converter for one of his bazookas last year, so he should damn well be able to hear it.

Peter half-whispers, “Drax?”

Drax looks up and, unlike Peter, says at just about full volume, “Ah. You are awake.”

“Yeah. How long was I out?”

“Just under nineteen hours.”

Peter blows out a breath. Not a full day, then. Jesus. At least that explains why he still feels like shit.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Peter automatically answers. “Why aren’t we moving?”

“We cannot.”

“The hell you mean, _we cannot?”_

“We cannot,” Drax repeats. “Three of the fuel cells were cracked during the battle.”

“Okay? There’s still three more, dude.”

“That will not suffice to get the entire ship to the nearest planet.”

“Not the old fashioned way,” Peter shrugs. “But if we take a couple jumps we’ll make it to Earth on three fuel cells easy. There’s one jump, like, less than half a parsec out from Titan. Wouldn’t take us more than a day to get there.”

There’s a second where Drax says nothing to that, and Peter’s patience is running real damn thin already.

 _“What,_ dude?”

Drax tells him, “The ship is not in the proper shape to go through a jump.”

Something really, really heavy sinks in Peter’s gut. “Seriously? We took that much damage?”

At that point, Mantis stirs, reaching up to rub the sleep from her eyes. The kid shifts in his sleep, too, eventually propping himself up on one elbow and twisting at the waist to see Peter still leaning most of his weight into the door frame.

“Is that…? Oh,” Mantis says, blinking rapidly as she comes fully awake. “Peter! How are—?”

“I’m fine,” he answers. Then, to Drax: “Back-up fuel?”

“Also damaged during the fight.”

“Did you guys try reversing the ion charge?”

“We did,” Drax tells him. “It provided enough extra power to keep the ship running for forty-eight hours.”

Yeah, that won’t do it. Peter curses under his breath, pressing his knuckles into his temple as he thinks, squeezing his eyes shut. They got plenty of water in back-up storage. The food on the ship is junk, but it should be enough for all four of them for a long while. Breathing’s gonna be the bigger problem. They got a week or two of oxygen, maybe, before it’s gonna run out and leave them all to suffocate out here. And that’s being generous. He could try rerouting some of the power from the atmo-regulator to buy them a few more days, but that’ll tank the temperature on the ship down below freezing and also, maybe, _possibly_ boil them all alive if they get caught in range of a star.

“There is one solution,” Drax says.

Oh, and Peter _does not_ like that tone. He opens his eyes and glares across the room at Drax.

“What kind of solution?”

“Rocket and Groot took the pod when they left,” Mantis quietly answers for him, because apparently she knows exactly where Drax is going with this. “But we still have one more stored beneath the ship.”

Peter frowns. “What, that old mining pod Rocket stole off Knowhere? There’s no way all four of us are fitting in that thing. Two of us, _maybe_ three of us, if we’re willing to get real cozy.”

“It would not be comfortable,” Drax admits. Then he says, like it’s as simple as that, “But the three of you would fit.”

Peter goes cold. From the top of his head to the tips of his goddamn toes. “No.”

“I said the same thing,” Mantis tells him, but in that quiet, defeated way that means she’s already gone ahead and accepted it.

“Yeah, that’s not happening.”

“It makes the most sense,” Drax says.

“No, it sure the hell doesn’t!”

“If we cannot get to another planet before—”

“Drax, it’s not happening, so just—”

“— then we have to—”

“Okay, _first_ of all,” Peter cuts him off again, growing more pissed off by the second, “even if we were gonna leave somebody behind, which we’re _not,_ it’d be me. Because I’m the captain, and the captain goes down with the ship. Everybody knows that, man.”

“I am the largest of all of us. I will not fit, but you—”

“And _second of all,_ we’re not leaving anyone behind anyway. All we gotta do is get the Benatar in good enough shape that she can make it through a couple jumps. That’s it.”

“Peter,” Mantis speaks up, quietly. “I do not think we will be able to do that. There is a _lot_ of damage.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll have to figure it out.”

“But how?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Peter doubles down.

Drax says, “And if we cannot—”

“We will, dude.”

“But—”

“Look, we’re not _fucking_ losing anyone else!” Peter finally snaps, shouting loud enough that his voice feels like it reverberates back through the walls, loud enough that it hurts something deep in his chest and renders him almost out of breath by the time he gets the last word out. Or maybe that’s the blood loss. Whatever. He doesn’t care.

All three of them say nothing to that, staring up at him. Peter scrubs a hand over his face, heaving, trying to catch his breath.

“We’re not losing anyone else,” he repeats, quieter. “We’re not. Screw that, I’m done. I’m _done._ Just… grab me a space suit. I’ll see what I can do.”

They were three more jumps from Nidavellir when Loki finally decided to accept that they were, in fact, going to Nidavellir. It was a waste of time, and it was only going to upset Thor further when he inevitably saw the kind of destruction left in the Mad Titan’s wake, but it was happening. The argument had lost its use, loathe as he might be to shut up about it.

So he leaned back against the wall of the pod, crossed his arms over his chest, and he shut up about it anyway.

Loki did think about saying something else. He thought briefly of bidding Heimdall off to Valhalla; surely Thor had already done so before Loki regained consciousness, but it rubbed him the wrong way to not know for certain. He thought about explaining to Thor that even if he’d known Thanos was attacking Nidavellir when he’d been posing as Odin, he wouldn’t have been able to do a thing to stop it. He thought about telling Thor that leaving Asgard undefended to protect Nidavellir would have doomed both realms at once.

He even thought about, Gods help him, _apologizing,_ but the words caught at the back of his tongue before he could give them shape.

So he changed the subject.

“Do you think he knows?”

Thor broke from his forlorn gaze out the pod’s back window to shoot him a look. “Who?”

“Quill,” Loki clarified, careful to keep his voice low enough that Rocket and Groot couldn’t hear. “Come now, even you’re not that thick. You had to have noticed.”

“What, that he’s not entirely human?”

“He’s something far different from human,” Loki said. He had a small but growing list of possibilities in the back of his head. “Doesn’t exactly act the part, though. Do you think he knows?”

Thor sighed and dropped his head back against the wall. He opened up his hands and asked, “Does it matter?”

Honestly, Loki wasn’t sure if it did. “Could be useful.”

“Could it?”

“Could have been,” Loki said, “had we not essentially sent him and his companions to their deaths while we gallivant off to a far-away planet to find a replacement for your beloved long lost hammer.”

Thor glared. Loki shrugged. The jab had hardly even been intentional. Habit, mostly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Thor decided. “What matters is killing Thanos.”

There were a multitude of things Loki wanted to say to that, too, at the forefront of which was the deep desire to make the case for turning and running away as far as this pod could possibly take them. But, for once, he kept his mouth shut. No distance would be safe if Thanos got what he was after, he knew that. The only thing left was to try and stop him, as much as the thought of facing him again turned Loki’s insides to putty, and so stop him they would. Or they would die trying.

Eventually, Loki sighed.

“Well,” he said, “let’s hope Eitri’s alive, then, shall we?”

For at least a few hours now, Loki has been under the impression that he has reached the upper limits of his anger. The well is all dried up. He’s too exhausted, too miserable, too stricken with grief down to his _bones_ to feel a fury the likes of which he felt in those first few minutes after Thor disappeared in front of his eyes.

But then he steps out onto the scorched Wakandan battlefields, and he sees all that’s left of Asgard touching down in a few meager escape pods laden with the survivors of Thanos’ attack. Six escape pods, when he knows, he _knows_ that at least twice that number managed to disembark from the _Statesman_ before the fight began.

The final blow comes when he realizes: The Valkyrie is not among the survivors.

And as it turns out, there are, in fact, still measures of fury that Loki has yet to experience. The last dregs of a reserve yet untapped.

 _Thanos, you thoughtless, sanctimonious, hypocritical_ fucking _bastard._

Why had he ever imagined that any of them might be spared the final culling? Thanos, for all his talk of righteousness and _balance,_ had not spared a single thought for the fact that Asgard had already been nearly wiped from existence by Hela and Surtur, their numbers halved and then halved and then halved again well before he ever set foot on their ship. Thanos hadn’t spared a thought for Asgard when he laid waste to half the _Statesman_ and left the other half adrift in their escape pods, and he didn’t spare a thought for them later, when he reduced their numbers yet again to a pitiful _handful._

 _Oh, I am going to rip your tongue from your throat,_ Loki thinks as he plasters on the closest thing to a neutral expression that he can manage, gathering the rest of the Asgardians — the staggering sixty or so of them that are left — and leading them back toward the palace. _I am going to pull your eyes from their sockets and slice your arms from your shoulders. I am going to use every ounce of magic I have in me to tear your insides to shreds while you’re still breathing. I am going to take that gauntlet and beat you to death with it, and then I will find whatever pitiful corner of Hel you’ve hidden yourself away in, and I will drag you right back to do it all over again._

It’ll be suicide, really, to even attempt it.

But with the arrival of a few pods capable of space travel, it might finally be an option to attempt it anyway.

“If it’s any consolation,” Thanos said, all four Infinity Stones gleaming bright in the gauntlet as he stood over Peter, “you should know I didn’t enjoy it.”

If Peter had the strength to stand up, he’d have done it. He’d have gotten right up and punched the guy all over again. There was a blaster wound in his temple from the last shot Peter managed to get off, a wound that might as well have been a goddamn cigarette burn for all the good it did, and Peter wanted to do _more,_ but he couldn’t, seeing as he was just about halfway through bleeding out right here on the ground.

“You tell her that when you see her, will you?”

Thanos clenched his fist, and Peter braced himself.

Screw it. If this was where it ended for him, then this was where it ended.

But then:

_“Wait.”_

“Oh, girl, what did they do to you, huh?”

The Benatar doesn’t answer.

And even if she did, well. It’s not like sound carries out here anyway.

Peter gently pushes off from her starboard wing, and the artificial gravity dies down with every meter of distance he gets, sending his every hair standing up and his skin tingling with the weird combo of weightlessness and the cold that seeps through his cheap forcefield space suit. He kicks his rocket boots into gear, jetting him in quick little _put-put-puts_ around the circumference of the ship.

She has… definitely seen better days, that’s for sure. The hull’s all riddled with dents. The windshield’s dinged up. There’s hunks of rock embedded in her air filters. There’s a hairline fissure in the wall of the ship’s underbelly that could rip apart under the pressure any second now. A section of the port side wing is _missing,_ torn off either on the rough landing on Titan or when the giant asshole was flinging parts of the planet around with that gauntlet.

There’s a whole host of cosmetic shit that Peter’s gonna have to set aside for later. For now, he’s got one goal and one goal only: get her in good enough shape that she’ll survive a few jumps. Otherwise they’re dead in the water, and they’ll never make it halfway to any habitable planet at all before they either freeze to death or starve to death or, most likely, suffocate when the oxygen runs out.

And the thing is, Peter meant what he said.

Even if Gamora’s absence — _and maybe Rocket and Groot’s, too, and if that’s the case it’s all your damn fault, Starlord_ — weighs like a burning stone in his gut, even if he can’t handle thinking about any of this messed up _bullshit_ for more than half a second without feeling like he’s gonna rattle to pieces, there is one thought that’s crystal clear in his head right now. One thought he’s got no problem repeating over and over again.

They are not losing anyone else.

Peter goddamn refuses to lose anyone else.

They’re not freezing to death out here, and they’re not starving to death, and they’re not gonna run out of oxygen, and they’re not leaving anyone behind. Not a single goddamn one of them. Not Drax, not Mantis, not the kid.

He doesn’t care what he has to do to make that happen.

Eventually, after he’s spent a good four or five hours out here welding and soldering the worst of the hull punctures, he catches a glimpse of shimmering metallic red out of the corner of his eye, and when he turns to look—

Oh. It’s the kid.

That weird metal armor he was wearing during the fight is back on, so apparently that thing’s built for space, seeing as the kid didn’t instantly start suffocating the second he came out here. He’s also gone ahead and hooked a second tether to his belt, and he’s using those massive mechanical spider-leg looking things to walk across the outer wall of the Benatar toward where Peter’s floating with a welding gun in his hand.

A second later, the kid’s voice comes through the comm system on Peter’s helmet.

_“Uh. Hey.”_

“Hi?” Peter says. It’s just the two of them out here, two lonely little human silhouettes against the endless backdrop of space behind them. “What are you doing out here, kid?”

For a second, Peter really worries that the kid’s gonna tell him something else has gone wrong. The Benatar’s oxygen alarm is already going off. All their food somehow disappeared. Or, almost worse, he worries that the kid came out here to _talk._ To talk about the fight, to talk about how Peter royally screwed them over, to talk about why that wizard guy gave up a whole Infinity Stone just to save him of all people — a question that Peter really, really, really does not want to be asked. Because the fact of the matter is he couldn’t answer it if he wanted to, and frankly, if he ever gets the chance he’d _love_ to give the guy a solid punch in the jaw for it.

(Because really? Half the universe, for him? What the hell kind of a trade was that?)

But the kid doesn’t ask about it, or about the fight.

Instead he asks, _“Can I help?”_

“Help?” Peter echoes, because that is just about the last thing he expected to hear. From the few minutes they’ve spent fully conscious around each other since the fight, Peter was kind of under the impression that he could jettison himself out the airlock and the kid wouldn’t bat an eye, let alone that he would be out here offering his _help._ Peter gestures vaguely at the Benatar and asks, “What, with the…?”

The kid shrugs. _“Yeah.”_

“You know anything about M-class ships?”

 _“Not… I mean, I know about spaceships in theory,”_ the kid tells him. _“Not in practice. But I’m a fast learner.”_

Peter glances over at the hairline fissure on the underside of the ship’s hull, and he thinks back to the fight, what he’s seen of this kid, what he’s seen him do.

“How much can you lift?”

_“Uh. I don’t know exactly. But I sort of lifted a building once?”_

“Shit, really?”

The kid nods.

Peter looks at the ship again. Then back at the kid. Then back down at the fissure.

“Alright, kid. Come down here and see if you can hold these two bits of wall in place while I solder them together, will you?”

They were losing.

Sam wasn’t an idiot. They put up one hell of a fight, but they were losing, and they were losing _fast._

It was easy to see from high up. He could see Bruce in that crazy Hulkbuster armor getting overwhelmed by ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen of those six-armed monsters. He could see Rhodes unloading his heaviest artillery on Thanos’ army, and he could see swarms of them rising up from the smoke like goddamn cockroaches. But worst of all he could see that all their forces were getting pushed back, closer and closer and closer to the palace, retreating further and further as the monsters and the big-ass ships took up the vast majority of the field with their own soldiers — whoever was left — dotting the place like ants.

How the hell were they supposed to fight against numbers like this? How the hell were they supposed to—

Then, out of nowhere, the whole place reeked of ozone. The air thrummed with static.

And the sky opened up.

Sam had met Thor once, at that little party just before the whole Ultron fiasco. But he had only ever seen _this_ on TV until now, the way Thor could show up or disappear in a rush of bright light. Nothing could do justice to the real thing. No camera or TV screen could capture the kaleidoscope of color searing his retinas as it crashed down in the middle of the field and reduced a whole mess of those monsters to nothing but a scorch mark in the grass.

Distantly, Sam could hear Bruce shouting over the rumble of thunder, triumphant and so relieved.

_“You guys are so screwed now!”_

And for a minute or two, Sam actually found himself believing it.

“So let me see if I got this right,” Sam says, massaging the bridge of his nose with his thumb. “You want us to go up into space and track down a dude we couldn’t beat when we had _twice_ as many people on our side, and see if we can kill him again. That about sum it up?”

Loki doesn’t roll his eyes, doesn’t scoff, doesn’t raise his voice. The dude might as well be made of stone.

“No. It doesn’t.”

Sam raises an eyebrow at him.

“You misunderstand,” Loki says. _“I_ am taking a pod out into space, and _I_ am going to track Thanos down and kill him. That I extend an invitation along to all of you is a mere courtesy.”

“How do you intend to do that?” the Princess asks, and Loki turns toward her.

“What, killing him?”

She nods.

He shrugs one shoulder. “By going for the head this time, I suppose.”

“And you think you can pull that off,” Bucky speaks up. “You. Alone.”

Loki flashes a patronizing smile at him. “I think I’ll manage.”

“You speak as if it’s not impossible,” the Princess says, frowning at him. “Why?”

Loki hesitates, then lets out a defeated sigh. “He’ll have been weakened by the use of the Infinity Stones,” he explains. “Dramatically weakened. And I imagine his willingness to fight at all will be quite a bit diminished, now that he no longer has something he’s fighting for.”

“What,” Sam says, “because he already _got_ it?”

Loki shrugs.

The Princess stands, then, eyeing Loki with something other than curiosity in her eyes, and Sam realizes why when she speaks.

“Would he still have the Infinity Stones with him?”

Loki pauses, and there’s a specific kind of hesitation there that Sam doesn’t like one bit.

“Perhaps,” Loki answers. “Perhaps not.”

“But if he did,” she goes on, eyes widening, “we could take them from him.”

“We could. Theoretically.”

“Wait,” Bucky says, and he’s not looking at Loki anymore. He’s looking at the Princess. “You mean we could… what, take those stones back and use them? Undo all of this?”

“Why not?” she asks. “If this can be done, then it stands to reason that it can be undone.”

“You do, however,” Loki says, surprisingly not unkindly, “underestimate the difficulty of wielding the Infinity Stones.”

She nods, only half listening. The gears are clearly already turning. “I can figure out the specifics later, but the fact that we might have a way to retrieve the stones at _all_ puts us in a much better position than we were only an hour ago. If we have even the slightest chance to bring everyone back, are we not obligated to try?”

“This is assuming we can find him,” Bucky reminds her.

Shuri’s totally undeterred. Practically giddy with the reignition of a spark of hope. “You just leave that to me, Sergeant Barnes. I am certain I can use the data gathered from my work on Vision to trace the energy from the Mind Stone and narrow down where it might have gone.”

“Of course,” Loki adds, “this is also assuming we can kill him.”

And it’s then that a new voice sounds from the lab entrance, a voice Sam hasn’t heard since the end of the battle. There’s a dip in the temperature of the room as she enters, a feeling of _off-_ ness in the pit of Sam’s stomach, and they all turn to see Wanda Maximoff standing in the doorway to the lab. She looks exactly as she did when she stalked off the battlefield, staring at them all in turn with red-rimmed, determined eyes.

“That,” she says, “you can leave to me.”

After the kid — who Peter eventually takes to calling _Peter 2.0_ in his head — helps him get the outer hull in as good shape as it’s gonna get, it still takes another full day of repairs, a full day of throwing the space suit back on and getting himself shoulder-deep in the engines from the outside, a full day of lugging spare parts around from the storage compartment in the back and _probably_ making his injury a hell of a lot worse, before he’s finally confident enough to risk taking them through the first jump.

Or at least he acts confident enough. In reality, he’s just done everything that _can_ be done, and he’d probably put their odds of making it through the jump without the ship rattling apart at a generous thirty percent.

He tells Mantis to take the kid and get nice and secure in the stolen Knowhere mining pod just in case things go south. Then, standing in the cockpit because he’s too nervous to sit, Peter grips the back of the captain’s chair and watches as Drax slowly, carefully, slides the lever forward and takes them through the jump.

 _Please,_ Peter thinks.

The black near-nothingness in front of the windshield shudders and then stretches, white pinpricks pulled into thin white lines as the hyperextended gravity tugs and pressurizes the whole damn ship.

_Come on._

_Just keep it together._

_Please._

The far off galaxies and collapsing stars and swirling clouds of space dust form a kaleidoscope of color outside the ship, the whole fabric of spacetime bending around them like taffy and preparing to spit them out on the other end.

She can do it, Peter thinks. The Benatar’s got it in her. She _has_ to.

And, miracle of goddamn miracles, she actually does.

The Benatar rocks to a stop in mid-space, with her joints groaning and with a fresh crack in the windshield, but—

Holy shit.

Holy _shit._

They made it.

Drax gives a triumphant shout when he realizes. From the lower level, Peter can hear Mantis shrieking in delight, probably hugging the hell out of that kid and crying the first happy tears she’s shed in a long damn time.

Peter swears his legs nearly give out under him, he’s so goddamn relieved. Instead he just drops his forehead onto the cool metal of the captain’s chair and lets himself breathe.

_That’s my girl._

_Knew you had it in you._

In the end, finding Thanos isn’t a problem.

Killing him isn’t, either.

They leave behind Groot, since he seems to be a kid by his species’ standards, as far as any of them can tell. They leave behind the Princess, too, since King T’Challa comes along for the mission, and they can’t exactly risk wiping out the whole royal family if things go south.

Plus, they figured— they _thought,_ anyway, that they might need the Princess later. They thought that when they eventually snagged all six Infinity Stones and brought them back home to Earth, she’d have to be the one that figured out how to use them.

That ends up not being the case.

“What the hell do you mean,” Sam says, his voice wavering, as King T’Challa and Bucky work together to force Thanos down to his knees with their arms around his throat, “you destroyed them?”

Bucky asks, “How’s that even possible?”

“It’s not,” Sam decides, shaking his head. “He’s lying.”

“He used the stones.”

Sam blinks, turning to look at Loki, who’s only staring emotionlessly down at Thanos. “You wanna run that by me one more time?”

“He used the stones,” Loki says again. “He used them to destroy them.”

From the look on Thanos’ face, Loki just hit it right on the money. The asshole even has the nerve to smile up at them. “I did,” he says in a voice so deep that Sam feels it rumbling through the floor. “And it nearly killed me. But the work is done. And it _always_ will be. I… am inevit—”

His voice chokes off, his mouth snapping shut.

Wanda steps up between Loki and Sam, her fingertips enveloped in the red light of her magic. There’s a moment where Thanos tries to speak, tries to open his mouth, but all that comes of it is a few muffled grunts.

The magic’s not just in her hands anymore, Sam realizes. It’s trickling up the length of her arms. It’s in the whites of her eyes.

“Are we certain he is telling the truth?” Wanda asks, casually, like she’s asking about the damn weather and not the fates of billions — _trillions_ of people. Nat and Steve and Thor and Vision and _everyone._ Red smoke curls in wisps around her face, seeping out from her eyes as she looks coldly down at Thanos. Again, Sam can feel it in his gut, the way her magic shifts and pulls at the air and makes everything feel a little off.

Loki says, “He’s telling the truth.”

“Very well,” Wanda says. “Then we have no more use for him.”

She twists her wrist, and the magic forces Thanos further down. Another twist and the magic swirls and coalesces into a deep, dark red that hovers over Thanos like an aura. It condenses and condenses until it _pops,_ and it explodes out in all directions and knocks Bucky and King T’Challa off of him, sending them both skidding back and tumbling over themselves on the floor.

Thanos, shockingly, is still in one piece. But he still doesn’t look like he’s breaking free of the magic any time soon.

“Did you know that I lost my brother three years ago?” Wanda asks him, tilting her head in a way that would almost be innocent under any other circumstances. “He was murdered by a creature that only knew destruction. And do you know what I did to it? To the thing that took my brother away from me?”

Her fingers twitch, and Thanos trembles. A trickle of blood falls from the corner of his left eye.

“I tore its heart from its chest.”

She clenches her fist, and there’s a horrible sort of _squelch_ sound that makes Sam think he might puke right here and right now.

Thanos is bleeding from both eyes, now. And his nose.

“You’re stronger than that thing was, though,” Wanda observes. “Far stronger. That’s good. It means this will take longer.”

“Wanda—”

She doesn’t stop, but the sound of Sam saying her name is apparently enough to break through the vindictive cloud of magic hanging over her. There’s the briefest second of hesitation, and then she rips both hands back. Another _squelch,_ more distinct this time, and Thanos goes slack. More blood trickles from his eyes, and now from his nose, too, and his mouth.

The magic releases its hold on him, and he collapses into the dirt with an anticlimactic _thwump._

He doesn’t get back up.

Wanda stares down at him for a long, silent moment. And then she turns around and walks away.

“Let’s go,” she says. “There is nothing for us here.”

After the first successful jump, it feels safe enough to take the Benatar through another.

And then another, and another, and another. She holds up for every single one, even if the last one’s got her quivering enough to make them all a little too nervous to try a fifth. But that’s okay. That’s enough. Only four days after Titan, and now they’re just about breaching the outskirts of Earth’s solar system.

They’ll be in range for communication by the end of the night.

So now Peter sits in the little alcove at the very front of the cockpit, his head leaning against the windshield and a bottle of too-strong Xandarian beer cradled in his lap. From here he can see a few asteroids ambling by, and a couple of the planets he remembers learning about when he still thought the Moon landing was as cool as space travel could get. There’s Jupiter, he thinks, or… is that Neptune? Which one’s the one with the rings?

Whatever. It’s probably Jupiter.

They’re getting real close now, though. For the first time in thirty years, Peter’s in the same solar system he was born in. And so far it’s pretty much how he’d have pictured it, end of the universe notwithstanding.

He always told Gamora he’d bring her along with him if he ever went back, though.

And oh, _that_ thought is like a white-hot hook dragging his heart down through his stomach and out through his belly button. Jesus Christ. He lifts up the bottle and takes another gulp, feels it slip down his throat like engine grease.

It’s right around then that, for whatever reason, Peter 2.0 decides to join him.

The kid quietly shuffles up to the front of the cockpit. The weird metal armor’s gone, or not _gone,_ really, but ditched a couple hours after they got done doing the outside repairs. He’s wearing a combination of all the Guardians’ clothes: an old tank top of Drax’s that he’s just about swimming in, the sweatpants Mantis bought on Contraxia last year, Peter’s old zip-up hoodie.

Peter watches him approach, then wordlessly pulls his knees up to his chest so the kid can sit down.

He takes the invite, sitting down and mirroring Peter, hugging his own legs close and dropping his chin on his knees.

The silence drags on for a while. Peter doesn’t know why the kid came to join him, but whatever. He takes another deep gulp of the beer, looks over the bottle for a few seconds, and holds it out in a wordless offer.

The kid wrinkles his nose. “What is that?”

“Xandarian beer.”

“I’m not old enough to drink.”

Peter frowns. “Really? How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“That’s… not old enough to drink?”

“No?” the kid asks, his brow creasing like he can’t figure out what the hell Peter’s on. “I thought you said you were from Earth.”

Peter sighs, blowing a raspberry through his lips and tipping his head back against the wall. Sure, he’s from Earth. Ask any of the other Guardians and he’s the leading authority on Earth. He gulps down the now ever-present lump in his throat and murmurs, “I haven’t been there in a really, really long time, kid.”

“Oh,” the kid says, and that’s that.

Peter takes another gulp of his beer, lets it slide down slower this time.

There’s no more repairs to do. No goal to single-mindedly throw himself at. Nothing to distract him anymore. He closes his eyes and all he sees is Titan again, miles and miles and miles of scorched red rock. He sees the moon coming down on Titan and he sees Thanos’ smug shitty face and he sees Knowhere and he sees Gamora standing at the business end of one of his own guns — _not him, you promised, I love you more than anything_ — and he sees Ego and he hears him saying _it broke my heart to put that tumor in her head_ and _I did what I had to do_ and he sees planet after planet after planet consumed by him and he sees Titan again and he sees his blaster colliding with the side of Thanos’ face and…

“I’m sorry, kid.”

When he opens his eyes, the kid’s looking at him like he’s nuts again. “Sorry for what?”

“For… screwing it all up,” Peter says, biting down on the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t start actually crying right here and right now. Jesus, that’d be embarrassing. And it’d probably make the apology fall a little flat, too. “For going nuts and throwing the whole fight. For being the whole reason all this… shit happened.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Peter snorts. “Oh.”

“I mean… I’m not like, mad at you.”

“No?”

The kid shakes his head. Peter doesn’t buy it.

“Not even for being the reason the wizard guy coughed up the only Infinity Stone we had?”

Again, the kid shakes his head. He starts picking at a loose thread at the bottom of his borrowed sweatpants. “I think I was. At first. But I don’t know. It’s all so… _crazy,”_ the kid says. He huffs a laugh that’s not really a laugh, and Peter suddenly realizes that of the two of them, _he’s_ not actually the one in danger of breaking down crying here. “I— I don’t know. I think I’m too… everything else? Sad and scared and… I don’t know. I just think there isn’t any room in my head for me to be mad anymore, I guess.”

There’s a while where Peter just lets that go without a response. Outside, another planet that’s goddamn gigantic slowly drifts by, all red and orange and white swirling gas. Pretty, for sure. Gamora would have thought so.

But no room in his head to be mad anymore, huh?

Peter has never in his life related to anything less.

“Well,” he finally forces himself to say, lifting up the bottle and toasting the kid with it. “That makes one of us.”

The days after they kill Thanos are… bleak, to put it nicely.

They do what they can. Bucky says he’s gonna stick around the Wakandan capital for a bit and help with the clean-up, and Sam doesn’t feel right not doing the same. After some thought, he floats the idea of heading back to the Avengers compound when they’re all wrapped up here, which Bucky seems ambivalent about and which Wanda doesn’t seem to actively _hate,_ so it looks like that’s the plan.

Not like they’ve got a whole lot of options anyway. Bucky’s been legally dead since the forties, and Sam’s apartment lease definitely ran out after about a week of him being a wanted fugitive, which was… oh, two years ago, now?

In the meantime, the work goes by pretty quick. Buck can lift a shitload and Wanda can lift much more than a that, so the two of them get to work clearing the battlefield of all those dead six-armed monsters and the massive crashed ships while the King and the Princess and all their remaining soldiers and guards focus on helping the people they’ve got left. Sam helps where he can, and where he can’t, he flies overhead and helps plan out the easiest course of action for Buck and Wanda to do the rest.

At the end of the first day, Sam’s more exhausted than he’s been in a long, long time, but at least he’ll be able to head back to the states in the next few days with a clear conscience, knowing he did what he could. For as little as that helps. So he trudges his way through the palace halls, heading up toward the room the Princess set aside for him, ready to knock out for a solid eight hours and not _think_ for the first time since all this happened.

Instead, though, something tells him to take a hard left into the first floor suite first, where there’s a _very_ well stocked bar that the Princess told them they were free to use as long as they were here.

Of course, he probably should’ve figured it wouldn’t be empty.

Sam stands in the doorway for about five seconds debating whether he should just turn around and go up to bed after all. Then he thinks _screw it,_ lets out a low whistle, and walks up to the bar.

“Not sure what kinda answers you’re looking for, but something tells me you’re not gonna find them on a cognac label.”

Loki spares him half a glance before going back to, uh… _very_ intently reading the bottle in his hand like it’s got the answers to the universe inscribed on it somewhere. His other hand is tangled in his hair, his elbow leaning heavily on the bartop. There’s another bottle of what might have once been rum next to him, totally drained to empty.

Sam shrugs.

“Or, you know, maybe you will. Whatever.”

He reaches across the bar and snags a glass from the rack. Then he scans his eyes over the alcohol on display, trying to find a single bottle that doesn’t cost more than a damn sports car, or at least a brand he _recognizes,_ and then, failing at that, he just grabs the bottommost bottle of whiskey and pops the cork.

When Loki finally speaks, he speaks in that slow, careful tone of someone who’s well on their way to getting fully wasted and is putting a lot of effort into enunciating every word.

“I am trying to determine if this will be sufficient to get me drunk.”

Sam squints at him. And at the empty bottle next to him. “Not gonna lie, man, you sort of look like you’re already there.”

Loki rolls his eyes.

“Not as drunk as you wanna be, huh?” Sam asks. “Yeah, no, I get it.”

 _“Do_ you.”

Sam almost laughs. Almost. “What, you think you got a monopoly on being messed up from all this? Nah. Sorry. Not at the end of the world you don’t.”

He takes a gulp of his whiskey; it goes down smooth as honey, which makes sense. Even the bottom shelf stuff here must have a price tag that would make Sam’s granddad roll over in his grave.

Eventually, Loki uncorks the cognac and takes a long glug from it.

And then keeps going.

And keeps going.

It’s not too long before Sam finds himself staring — the dude doesn’t come up for air _once_ — and he watches Loki chug and chug until the entire bottle’s empty, at which point he keeps holding his breath, eyes shut like he’s trying not to gag.

Then he releases the breath, opens his eyes, and says, “Nearly there.”

“Oh- _kay,_ cowboy.”

After a second or two of internal debate, Sam reaches over and grabs a second glass. There’s one of those drink dispensers hooked up to the tap, so he presses the button with the little water droplet on it and pours until the glass is filled to the brim.

Then he slides it in front of Loki.

“What is this?”

“It’s this real fancy Earth drink called water,” Sam says. “And look, you’re prickly enough when you’re sober, man. I don’t wanna know what you’re like when you’re hungover.”

Loki frowns at him with a look that says, _what the hell are you talking about,_ but then he shrugs, tilts his head like he’s agreeing, and pulls the glass of water closer so he’s hunched over it.

They sit in silence after that for a while. And Sam’s cool with that. Gives him time to finish off a glass of whiskey, pour a second, and start to feel a little pleasantly numb.

Eventually, though, the silence starts to nag at him.

“I met this, uh… this lady,” Sam says, rolling his glass on the bartop. He’s not even sure Loki’s listening, but whatever. If he’s got a problem with Sam talking then he can find somewhere else to drink himself stupid. “I was trying to help out in the infirmary earlier, you know, just trying to see what I could do. Tall, white, no nonsense, gives you a real _Catholic school nun_ kinda vibe. She said, and I’m quoting her here, she said she’s been working with medicine for three _thousand_ years.”

Loki’s looking down through his glass. He’s actually taken a few sips from it by now, and after a second he says, “Eir.”

Sam nods. “Told her I had a little experience from when I was in the field, but I don’t think she was planning on giving me the light of day until she found out I was part of our little… killing Thanos, thing. She was all smiles after that.”

He lets that hang for a second. He’s not even sure what his point is here.

Something about the fact that the Asgardians wasted no time in trying to help wherever they could, just like Sam’s been trying to do. Something about the inherent need to _do something_ about all this — a need that, apparently, isn’t limited to humans. Something about how this Eir lady seemed pretty damn satisfied to hear that Thanos was dead, as pointless as his death ended up being.

Loki tips his glass back and downs the rest of it, then lets it _plunk_ down on the bartop.

Then, slowly, quietly, he speaks.

“Asgardians are… a very battle-oriented people,” Loki says, cradling the empty glass in both hands. “Proud. Brave, often to the point of foolishness. They’re… _frustratingly_ principled, every last one of them. It’s drilled into our minds from birth. Vengeance has been enacted upon our aggressor, and that… well, it’s something that would grant them a great deal of peace, I imagine.”

“Peace, huh?”

Loki scoffs. Clearly he feels about as _at peace_ with it as Sam does.

“I’m meant to rule them,” Loki goes on. “I’m _supposed_ to rule them, and… for the first time in my life, I have absolutely no idea how to go about it. I don’t even know where I’m _taking_ them. I don’t know where they’ll live after all this. I don’t know what they’ll do. I don’t… _want_ to rule them.”

“But they need somebody in charge,” Sam follows, “and you’re the guy saddled with the job.”

Loki nods, slowly, staring into space with a familiar haunted look in his eyes.

“There are _sixty-one_ of them left,” he says, like he’s not even talking to Sam anymore so much as he’s just thinking out loud. He closes his eyes for a second, clenches his jaw tight, and when he opens his eyes again he’s glaring at the shelves and bottles like they’ve committed a personal affront against him. “Sixty-one, where there was once thousands upon thousands. Sixty-one people I’ve only known at a distance all my life, people whose entire culture I happily renounced years ago, people whose names I hardly know.” He gulps. Lowers his voice. “Those people are now, quite literally, _all_ I have left.”

And Sam… doesn’t exactly have anything he can say to that.

Sure, he can relate, sort of. On a much smaller scale. That’s how he feels about what’s left of the Avengers, about Wanda and Bucky and — if he can find them, if they’re still around — Scott and maybe Clint, too. And sure, he can empathize, but at the end of the day, every single person on the planet that’s still _breathing_ is going through some variation of this, aren’t they? This gut-deep grief that none of them are gonna be able to shake for a long, long time.

It’s… a lot. A hell of a lot.

It’s damn exhausting to think about, let alone talk about.

So Sam picks up the whiskey bottle and, without saying a word, tips it and pours some into Loki’s glass.

Loki blinks slowly at his new drink, then huffs a laugh. “Thanks.”

In lieu of a _you’re welcome,_ Sam lifts his own glass in a toast and then downs the last bit at the bottom.

“You were…” Loki says, squinting, “… the captain’s friend, yes?”

And yeah, okay, that still stings every bit as it did a couple days ago. The past tense. You _were_ the captain’s friend. Sam pours himself a third glass and says, “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. Honestly.”

“Yeah,” Sam sighs. “I am, too.”

He shoves the cork back onto the whiskey bottle; he’d rather cut himself off at three and avoid the hangover tomorrow, thanks. Then he takes another slow gulp from his glass, and it’s with Steve still at the forefront of his mind that he says what he says next.

“So, we’re gonna be heading back to the states,” Sam says, tipping his head back and forth as he estimates, “tomorrow, next day, maybe. Can’t stay here forever, and the Avengers compound’s still up and running, far as I know. Wanda, Bucky, and me. That’s all that’s left. And that place has got, like…” he trails off, blows out a breath, “… a _crazy_ amount of space. Way too much for just the three of us.”

Loki doesn’t look up from his glass. “What are you suggesting?”

“Not suggesting. Offering,” Sam says. “Plenty of room there for an extra sixty or so people.”

The irony of inviting _this_ guy, specifically, to come live at a facility built by and for the same people that kicked his ass during the Incident can’t be lost on him. It’s not lost on Sam, either, but whatever. Sort of feels like the whole concept of good guys and bad guys got thrown out the window when Thanos snapped his fingers.

And it doesn’t hurt that this feels like what Steve would do, if he was still around.

“Plus, you know,” Sam adds, clearing his throat and pulling that train of thought off the tracks before it can gain any momentum, “before this shit hit the fan we all spent a _lot_ of time trying to figure out how to help Wanda learn to use her—” he waves his fingers in the air— “whatever, and we never really got anywhere, seeing as what we all knew about magic amounted to about… zero. Couldn’t hurt having someone around who actually knows what the hell he’s talking about.”

Loki’s still quiet, tipping his glass back and forth, watching the liquor swirl around.

Sam doesn’t really need an answer, though. He downs the rest of his third glass— and oh yeah, he is feeling _very_ pleasantly numb, which was something he desperately needed tonight. Maybe he’ll even be able to get some decent sleep if he’s lucky.

He leans across the bar and sets the glass upside down over the little draining rack.

Then he pats Loki once on the back, gets up out of his seat, and makes his way out of the bar.

“The tree would have to come with me,” Loki finally says, when Sam’s just about through the doorway. Sam turns to look at him, but the dude’s still facing away from him, rolling his glass on the bar. “Groot,” he clarifies, like there’s some other tree he could have been talking about. “Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person on this planet who can understand him.”

Sam nods, even though Loki still can’t see it.

“Yeah, I think we can manage that,” he says, and he taps the doorframe in lieu of a _goodnight_ on his way out.

So _that’s_ how Sam ends up heading to the Avengers compound the next day with Bucky, Wanda, Thor’s crazy brother who tried to take over Manhattan six years ago, thirty-seven Asgardian adults, twenty-four Asgardian kids, and one talking teenage tree.

And then, the day after _that,_ when they’re all still trying to settle everyone in and figure out where the hell they go from here…

A spaceship the size of a damn football field lands in their front lawn.

Peter waits until they’re just a few minutes shy of landing before he tries the comms. Mantis and Drax are sitting in their respective cockpit seats, watching as Earth opens up below them in bright blues and greens and browns. From this high up you’d never know anything was out of the ordinary. You’d never know what the hell had just happened here, what had just happened _everywhere._

Behind them, way in the back of the cockpit, the kid’s already got his cell phone pressed to his ear, crying again while he talks to someone named May and assures her over and over and over again that he’s safe, he’s okay, he’ll be home soon. And that last one is definitely true, at least; Peter and Drax and Mantis are gonna fly him straight to New York City and drop him off right at his doorstep as soon as they can, but first…

First, they have to find Rocket and Groot.

They have to find out if they’re still—

Peter shakes his head and takes a breath to calm his nerves, which doesn’t work at all. And then, before he can talk himself out of it for the millionth time, he presses the button to patch the Benatar through to Rocket’s and Groot’s comms.

“Rocket? Groot? Hey, if either of you guys can hear me—”

_“I am Groot!”_

Mantis immediately jumps out of her seat, covering her mouth with both hands. Drax leans forward as if bringing himself closer to the comms will get him closer to Groot any faster, looking from the comms to Peter and back again.

Peter sniffs, scrubbing at his eyes, and his voice comes out embarrassingly choked up when he presses the button again and says, “Hey, buddy! Long time no see.”

_“I am Groot!”_

“Yeah, we were worried about you, too,” Peter tells him. He doesn’t know whether he should just come right out with it or put it off, but, well, there’s no way Groot isn’t about to ask, and he deserves to know as soon as possible. Peter still stumbles over saying it anyway. “It’s, uh— it’s me and Drax and Mantis.”

_“I am Groot?”_

Peter shakes his head, and then remembers Groot can’t see it. “No, uh. Just us. I’m sorry, bud.”

_“… I am Groot.”_

Drax curses under his breath. Mantis lets out a little _oh_ and sits back down. Peter closes his eyes for a second and gulps down the lump in his throat, trying to reorient himself in a world that’s missing not just Gamora and Nebula, but Rocket, too.

Shit. Goddamn it.

“Hey,” Peter says when he can trust his voice again. “It’s gonna be okay, alright? It’s gonna be okay. Where are you?”

_“I am Groot.”_

“Okay,” Peter says, nodding, already estimating the distance in his head. The Avengers Compound is damn close; they should be able to drop the kid off with his Aunt May and get to where Groot’s at in no time. “Yeah, alright, just stay put and we’ll come to you. Won’t be more than twenty minutes, okay? Promise.”

“We’ll see you very soon, Groot,” Mantis speaks up. “We’ve missed you very much.”

_“I am Groot.”_

“Yeah,” Peter says. “Yeah, we love you, too, kiddo.”

The thing is, life’s gonna keep on moving.

The world’s gonna keep on spinning and time’s gonna keep marching along, even if none of them want it to. Sam has never in his entire life felt the passage of time more acutely than he does in the week following the snap, when each second that ticks by marks another second of living in this bizarre and painful new existence where half of everyone he’s ever known is gone.

But, well, that’s just the way it is.

So they adapt.

Sam and Bucky get to work making the compound habitable for everybody, with a whole lot of help from a various assortment of Asgardians, depending on the day. A spaceship lands on the compound’s front lawn with what must be Groot’s family, judging by the way the one human-looking dude steps off the ship and immediately sinks to his knees and hugs the little tree like a long lost kid, quickly followed by another two aliens who step off the ship and turn the whole thing into a group hug right there in the grass. They end up spending a lot of time hanging around the compound, too. It’s unclear exactly how long they plan on staying, but they pull their weight — and then some, in Drax’s case — and spend most of their time on that spaceship of theirs anyway, so it’s not like Sam’s about to complain. Loki keeps almost entirely to himself in the first week, and Wanda does, too; though Sam does catch wind of them hanging out in the old training rooms every other day or so, only visible thanks to the intermittent flashes of red and green light emanating from the high windows when somebody thinks to look.

It’s… Well, it’s an existence. A life. It’s not necessarily a good one, but it’s the one they’ve been saddled with, and it’s the one they’re making the best of with whatever means they have.

With the Infinity Stones gone and with no hope of going back to the old life, well, what other choice do they have?

But then, in the middle of their downtrodden efforts to keep on trucking through, hope does arrive. It arrives one week after Thanos snapped his fingers, it arrives at the Avengers compound front door in an old beat-up van, and it arrives in the form of a woman _literally_ named Hope.

Because Sam’s life is a goddamn comic book these days.


End file.
